from Hacker News

Life Lessons After 10 Years of BetterExplained.com

by jrheard on 1/12/17, 6:30 PM with 22 comments

• by WA on 1/12/17, 10:58 PM

  Wow, that was a great post. I can share quite similar numbers: I run my business for 10 years now. It makes about 12,000€ per month. It grew 24% last year. Most traffic comes through evergreen content. I wrote about a hundred articles with 220,000 words in total. I answered more than ten thousand support emails over the years and generally try to be helpful. I didn't do social media.

  I want to add two things:

  1. I change articles when I don't like them anymore. I treat articles like shopping windows. Nothing for eternity. I experiment.

  2. I don't get the newsletter advice. Seriously. Whenever I read something like this, it's always: Start a mailing list for the simple reason to be able to contact people. I get the idea, but I don't understand the details. This advice never talks about two quite important things:

  a) What should you write in your newsletter, if your articles are evergreen and mostly to attract new readers? They're not made for existing customers – at least not in my case.

  b) Email lists grow stale. People might read your newsletter for months and after a year or so, they'll forget about it or delete every email. That 50,000 subscriber email list grown over 8 years? Probably way less worth than many people think, because relevant are only the last 7,000 or so. Better than nothing, I guess.

  Obviously, I don't have a newsletter, although I have people's email addresses, because people need to have an account to use my software. But I actually never contact them.

• by politician on 1/12/17, 9:13 PM

  "The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is now."

• by s_m_t on 1/12/17, 10:09 PM

  Pretty much everything I know I've learned from the internet or from books I found on the internet... but for some reason I had not found your site until just now from this post! It looks really nice so I'm going to start reading it.

  Actually, now that I think about it, I probably have come across your site before but I think I may have exited out after a quick glance at the front page. Maybe I'm crazy but when I first look at your site it seems like I have to sign up for some sort of service to access the content. I hate signing up for services, free or otherwise. The first thing I see is

  'Math without endless memorization.

  Instead of memorizing procedures, learn why equations work. This site helps you overcome mental roadblocks and truly grasp new concepts.'

  and then a box right below it asking me to give you my email. If I press pagedown I get to a section titled 'blog posts' (in my mind not the actual content I would be looking for) and then at the very top of the page I see the horizontal navigation bar, but none of the titles really read 'click here to learn cool stuff for free'. By this point I've probably left your website. Something to think about, definitely going to start reading your site and I really respect what you do.

• by handsomechad on 1/12/17, 9:48 PM

  Just commenting to say I love your site. Used it a lot growing up / in college. Extremely lucid explanations

• by charlieflowers on 1/13/17, 2:58 AM

  Hello, Kalid. At the "critic" from the HN post, just wanted to say hi and that I am as big a fan as ever. It was interesting to me to read our discussion again.

• by thefalcon on 1/12/17, 9:28 PM

  I appreciate the effort and intention behind trying to avoid becoming an eHow or HowStuffWorks.

• by mamurphy on 1/12/17, 11:56 PM

  Good post. I run a small blog and your retrospective gave me some good insights on how to approach things moving forward. The idea of evergreen content and your monetization breakdown were nice to see.

• by wodenokoto on 1/13/17, 2:48 PM

  I love betterexplained and I almost religiously check if it has an article on any topic I'm reading up on.

  At least the free content can't stand alone, but it makes khan academy or coursera videos much easier to follow if I've read an article on Betterexplained before hand, and I think that has tremendous value.

  Does anybody have experience with any of the courses? Are they worth it?

• by chris_wot on 1/13/17, 8:24 AM

  I think I might have been the Chris who was on his feels good list. I said it then, and I'll say it again - the guy is incredible!

• by mhartl on 1/13/17, 2:31 AM

  Thanks for the great post, Kalid! Both useful and inspiring.

• by RichardHeart on 1/14/17, 1:32 PM

  I love the evergreen content advice!